Doctors linked smoking with ill-health in the 1930s and a cancer scare took hold in the 1950s but tobacco companies turned around sales by offering ‘safe’ low-tar and filter tip varieties, and with intensive advertising.

Derivatives

filter-tipped

And later this month BBC2 airs a satirical American documentary called The Last Cigarette, which intercuts footage of the congressional hearings with innocent ads from the 1950s extolling the health benefits of filter-tipped ciggies.

‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘every January 11 th - the anniversary of the Surgeon General's original 1964 report on smoking - we should all light up, giving a filter-tipped finger, as it were, to a health-obsessed government.’

At the beginning of the 1950s, filter-tipped brands occupied 1 percent of the cigarette market.